Sydney Life

My thesis is due in less than two months.

My body has been replaced by ten buckets of stress and a half a dozen bits of nervous wreck.

When I began my thesis, waaaaaaaaay back in December, October 2006 seemed like a very, very long time away. Happily, I plodded along and steadily studied, putting in my hours at the Fish like my Honours comrades. I enrolled in my coursework options, believing (like everyone else) that 4 hours a week was going to be a cinch.

Puh-lease! Four hours of classes, as opposed to the twelve hours I was used to? Pfft, I could do it in my sleep!

But Semester One was a lot tougher than I bargained for. There were many sleepless nights and lots of frantic late-night phone calls to friends, asking about referencing and photocopying and how to safely remove a USB.

Finally it was over - my essays were written and submitted, and I could concentrate solely on my adored thesis. The very reason for taking twelve months out of my extremely jam-packed* schedule was so that I could devote such time to studying my area of interest. So, without the coursework to load me down, I was able to expend my energy on reading and writing about the Black Power autobiographies.

Mmmm....or, I did, until I decided I needed a week's break. Which was so much fun that it stretched into two weeks. After two weeks of relaxing with yoga and walks on the beach** it was very difficult to pick up my pens/open my laptop....and so any work I did was quite sporadic and unstructured, for another week or so.

Now that my deadline is looming ever nearer, I am freaking out, quite simply. All the typical secondary characteristics of 'nervous breakdown' are present: cold sweats; inability to eat anything but chocolate and various treats constituted mainly of sugar (and a distinct desire to avoid sushi, after last week's debacle...there comes a point when you have food poisoning when you honestly believe it is better that you die, rather than live with the shocking discomfort); crying fits and temper tantrums; concocting lies to extract yourself from social occasions at which you really should be; and of course, lack of style, grace, wisdom or commonsense.

My hair is stringy. My lips are unglossed (I once had an hourly reapplication process.) My face is a graveyard of dead skin cells and my hips are no doubt clotted with cellulite after my Tim Tam/ice cream/soft drink binges.

So why would anyone do their thesis?

Ask me in October. I'm too tired to answer right now.

* the very vacant expanse of the last days of my youth
** Shopping and watching DVDs